As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Various members of the Outer Alliance are either posting fiction, or reviewing something or otherwise attempting to fill that declaration of intent. For my part I decided today to do a sketch based on my favourite chapter of The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs, the sequence entitled the black fruit which Burroughs wrote with Michael Portman. Ticket was the first Burroughs book I read at the age of 16 or so, having discovered a copy in a local library, and it really felt like something exploding in the head. For a start, the text is some of his least accommodating for an average reader, although I was already familiar enough with literary experiment to cope with that. Far more electrifying was seeing familiar scenarios from science fiction and fantasy infused with a raw and relentless gay sexuality of endless erections and spurting cocks. The black fruit begins with a science fiction scene of lost astronauts encountering alien fishboys intent on having sex; it then progresses through a series of descriptions which read like a pornographic rewriting of similar scenes from HP Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. In the opening pages of Ticket, Burroughs describes his book as “science fiction” but this was like no sf I’d read; I started to wish there was more like it. There are flashes of similar stuff in The Soft Machine (including an idea borrowed from Henry Kuttner) and elsewhere, and Cities of the Red Night is pretty much a full-on fantasy in its second half, but I’d still like to read more about the fishboys…

Fishboy and Astronaut (detail).

So here’s an explicitly erotic sketch based on the black fruit (click the picture for the full thing). This should have been a lot better but I’m out of practice drawing at the moment and I didn’t give myself enough time. The scene doesn’t really match the book either, and the astronaut figure is pretty crappy. Feeble excuses aside, Burroughs’ rotting swamp gardens with their marble statues of copulating boys deserve better. And where his fiction leads, I’m still hoping that more writers will follow, not by copying his obsessions but by being as fearless and honest in mining their own.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• The art of NoBeast

The Ticket that Exploded. Cover design by Thomi Wroblowski for a John Calder edition, 1985.

William S Burroughs: A Man Within is a feature-length documentary by Yony Leyser, and is, so the makers say, the first posthumous documentary about the always essential writer. Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs, is probably definitive where the biography is concerned since Brookner was fortunate to get most of the key surviving Beats, family members, and allies while they were still around. Leyser’s trailer looks interesting, however (I’m hoping the film isn’t merely a parade of celebrities and soundbites), and it’s things like this which pass on the message of Burroughs’ continued importance to a new generation.

The film features never before seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, George Condo, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, David Ohle, Wayne Propst, Dr. William Ayers, Diane DiPrima, Donovan, Dean Ripa (the world’s largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller, and soundtrack by Sonic Youth. 

Release is slated for later this year. Meanwhile, there’s another trailer on YouTube for a Burroughs’-inspired short, The Japanese Sandman, based on WSB’s quest for the drug yage in the jungles of Panama. For an explanation of the title, consult the Reality Studio.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Final Academy
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

It’s inevitable when writing about gay art and artists that Oliver Frey’s name will turn up eventually, so here’s the requisite posting. Frey is often better known in gay circles under the nom de plume he used in the 1980s, “Zack”, when he was a very prolific illustrator and comic artist for Britain’s small number of gay mags. As Oliver Frey he was already well-known as an accomplished professional illustrator who was for a time an artist for Look and Learn’s long-running science fiction adventure strip The Trigan Empire. That professional work makes him probably the most widely-seen of all gay porn artists simply because he drew some Superman pages which are briefly seen at the beginning of the 1978 Superman.

His career as a comic artist honed his skill at dealing with figures and telling a story which is one of the reasons his gay strips are still highly valued today. Those strips tend to be completely pornographic right from the start so I’ll spare the delicate sensibilities of some of the readers here and link you to some collections of his Zack work instead. In the meantime, I’d love to know where the picture of the boy with the sword (above) comes from originally. It’s a lot more finished than his Zack drawings and is paired on this page with a similar picture of serpent-twined tribal youths which hints at some kind of Burroughs-esque Wild Boys scenario. If anyone knows the answer, please leave a comment. As it is, it makes a good addition to the Men with swords archive, as does the piece of fluff below.

Oliver Frey links:
• Arrumako’s Gay Blog | A substantial collection of complete strips and sundry illustrations.
• Daddy’s Here | More single illustrations and some magazine scans including an interview with the artist.
• Gay Erotic Art Links | Another page with further links elsewhere.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The men with swords archive

The entire run of Britain’s first underground/alternative newspaper. Incredible. IT was never as flashy as Oz but ran for longer and arguably had the better contributors, among them William Burroughs. One notable feature was an avant garde comic strip, The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, written by Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison with artwork by Mal Dean and Richard Glyn Jones. Heavyweight contributions to magazines tend to get reprinted, however, what I enjoy seeing in archives such as this is the ephemera which can’t be found elsewhere: adverts, reviews and illustrations like the one below. The site is a bit slow and it would have been good to have individual issues as PDFs but it feels churlish to complain. More archives like this, please.

Via Jahsonic.

Illustration by Stanley Mouse (1969).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Realist
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

Aubrey Beardsley rarely wasted an opportunity to include a faun, satyr, herm or Pan figure in his early drawings, whether suitable or not. His title page for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé featured a herm (censored by the publisher) which had nothing to do with the play, and there’s a Pan figure brandishing pipes in his earlier How King Arthur Saw the Questing Beast, from the Morte D’Arthur. Beardsley was an increasingly celebrated artist by the time he was asked to illustrate the Keynotes series of novels for John Lane in 1893 and with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the notoriety of the artist joined forces with an author whose weird tale was condemned as obscene, even as it established Machen as a uniquely gifted writer. Machen knew Crowley via The Golden Dawn and his tale of femme fatale Helen Vaughan was followed by an eruption of Edwardian paganism with Saki’s stories, A Touch of Pan and Pan’s Garden by Algernon Blackwood, The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany, The Goat-Foot God by Dion Fortune and others. There’s even that curious moment in The Wind in the Willows whose seventh chapter, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, finds Mole and Rat having a mystical encounter:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

If the 18th century looked to the Classical world for order—especially where architecture was concerned—the 19th century seemed to find in Pan a spirit contrary to a world which was altogether too ordered, regimented and industrialised. Artists and writers in Germany seemed to think so when they named their Symbolist periodical after the pagan god. PAN was founded in 1895 and featured a stunning range of fin de siècle talent:

The journal PAN, which was published in Berlin between 1895 and 1900, is regarded as one of the most important voices of Art Nouveau in Germany. Edited by Otto Julius Bierbaum and Julius Meier-Graefem, the journal published numerous illustrations by well-known, and also unknown, young international artists. Additionally, there were full-page original designs, a simple modern typeface, vignettes and other forms of illustration. Some of the more well-known artists who published in PAN include Peter Behrens, Franz von Stuck, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Auguste Rodin, Paul Signac and Félix Vallotton. Like the journal Jugend, PAN was critical about the artistic policy of the German Empire under Wilhelm. The journal attempted to present the very best of contemporary art, without showing preference for any particular school or movement, in order to allow comparison with classical art.

Cover by Franz Stuck.

PAN is featured regularly in books about the art of the period but for a long time there was next to nothing about the periodical on websites. That’s changed thanks to the Heidelberg University Library which has the bound collection whose cover is shown above available to view as high-res scans or to download as a single PDF. The text is in German, of course, but there’s a wealth of gorgeous Art Nouveau designs within, as well as many fine illustrations.

Joseph Sattler.

Man, Myth & Magic #1 (1970). Cover illustration is a detail of Elemental aka The Vampires are Coming aka Pan by Austin Osman Spare.

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin regularly mourned the death of Pan in the modern world, despite Burroughs invoking Pan’s spirit (among others) at the opening of Cities of the Red Night while Gysin maintained a lifelong devotion to the panpipe music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Pan Books still survives, albeit as a shadow of its former self, and filmgoers have found themselves lost in Pan’s Labyrinth; I produced a mis-proportioned Pan portrait of my own in 1986. There are many other examples to be found. Something about the primal archetype which Pan represents won’t be buried so easily. Pan isn’t dead; far from it, he’s as lively as ever.

Update: Take me into insanity | A Guardian piece about the Joujouka pipers.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peake’s Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine
• Arthur Machen book covers
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Hadrian and Greek love
• The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

Ed Jansen writes to let me know that the latest edition of his web magazine, Passage, is now online. Once again, most of the features listed below are in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. David Britton has been recommending Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to me so I guess I’ll be reading that soon.

• Sylvia Plath, a biography.
• Ingrid Jonker, poet from South-Africa, essay on her life and work.
• Jack Kerouac & William Burroughs, a review of And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks.
• William Burroughs in Texas, a review of Rob Johnson’s, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs.
• Aleister Crowley, an article about Crowley’s possible involvement with the Secret Service.
• Rudolf Hess, double agent? A view on his flight to Britain.
• Jonathan Littell, an in-depth review of his work The Kindly Ones. War as hallucination.
• Enrique Marty & Maurizio Cattelan, a review of the work from two conceptual artists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 10

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

I haven’t been using Twitter for very long and until today hadn’t seen the way it can spur people to action with incredible speed. Among my circle of people it was Neil Gaiman who set things rolling with a link to this post by author Mark R Probst which describes how Amazon.com have been quietly removing the sales rankings from books with gay content. Writer Craig Seymour notes it happening to a book of his back in February. They claim this is done as part of their policy of removing sales ranking from anything deemed “adult” and is intended to help (ie: protect by blanking) customers who don’t want to see “adult” material turn up in their searches:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

It quickly became apparent that LGBT titles are being penalised in a very scattershot manner. As Jezebel.com noted:

Queer theory books, books on coming out, and feminism books lose their rankings, but A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality gets to keep its rank? WTF?!?

Other people noted that Mein Kampf gets to keep its sales rank. There’s a growing list of affected titles here. Examples of inconsistency can be found all over; an early title by William Burroughs, Queer, has no sales ranking while Cities of the Red Night does. The latter contains a lot more hardcore gay sex than the former but I guess it was the title which damned Queer rather than the content. I could go on listing and comparing but you can do that yourself, it’s a curious diversion wondering what gets hit and what doesn’t. I had a quick look through Amazon.co.uk and that seems affected in an equally haphazard manner with gay-themed academic titles being stripped of their rankings while other books with erotic scenes (Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, for example) are left alone. Plenty of non-gay erotic books have also been left alone.

As a consequence of this the obvious thing to do is to boycott Amazon until there’s a clear change of policy, and I say this as someone who has a book of his own on sale there. Buy it elsewhere, people. I’m changing the Amazon Associates links on this site so they point to publishers’ pages or other booksellers. I’ve never made much from the Associates scheme but in the two years I’ve been a part of it the various clicks and orders from visitors have generated Amazon nearly £1000 ($1800). Given their present policy towards LGBT books—accidental or otherwise—I don’t see why I should be assisting them any further.

Update: A theory that this was caused by some clever trolling. Um, I think not. As noted above, it’s been going on for some time.

Update 2: Amazon says: “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.” Gay news blogs remain unconvinced. A pertinent quote from Andy Towle at Towleroad:

It … brings up a wider issue. This kind of double-standard happens not only across the internet but across media. Towleroad, for example, although we carry no pornographic content, is widely blocked as “adult” by many corporate filters simply because we write about gay issues. It’s the same reason magazines like OUT and The Advocate are often placed among porn titles on newsstands when they clearly don’t belong there.

Update 3: Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s appraisal of the farrago. Best theory I’ve seen so far (Amazon’s “glitch” excuse isn’t enough for most people, hence the ongoing theorising). Note that he doesn’t rule out the trolling theory either.

Update 4: Finally…a more detailed admission of culpability from someone at Amazon.

Update 5: NYT “Amazon Says Error Removed Listings“.

Update 6: Last word on the whole business (maybe).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Shinro Ohtake

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre sculpture on its cover. Inside there’s my portrait of William Burroughs illustrating a piece about Burroughs’s Gnostic identification by Sven Davisson. (I linked to another essay on the same theme in 2007.) The Gnostic is an excellent publication which, the Alan Moore interview aside, I’ve only skimmed through so far. Alan’s piece is very enlightening since the discussion stays fixed around religion, science and the occult and includes the most thorough extrapolation I’ve seen to date of his long work in progress, Jerusalem. There’s also a transcript of part of his William Blake piece from 2001, Angel Passage. If you want to know more I suggest you order a copy ($12 / £8 / €9) from Bardic Press.

Coincidence further abounds as this arrived just as Pádraig Ó Méalóid publicly announced his discovery of the long-lost and unpublished third issue of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers. This was Alan’s self-published “real life” comic series from 1989 which got off to a great start then fatally collapsed when artist Bill Sienkiewicz, then his replacement, Al Columbia, both dropped out of the project. It’s one of the great lost projects of contemporary comics and seeing the third issue sustaining the quality of the first two is deeply frustrating.

The last piece of Moore news concerns The Mindscape of Alan Moore once again which is now available to buy through iTunes. $9.99 will only get you the feature-length documentary, however. If you buy the double-disc DVD you also get my groovy interface design and an extra disc of interviews with major comic artists.

Update: Alan Moore has certainly ruled the week in this household with the delivery on Friday of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, a new edition of George Khoury’s book-length autobiographical interview with Alan, and an essential purchase for anyone with more than a cursory interest in Alan’s life and work. The book features copious artwork examples by many Moore collaborators including my CD designs and the cover for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs: Gnostic visionary

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics and steer closer to the brutal reality. Among the touchstones there was On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, the anarchist pirate community in Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs and the ferocious scalp-hunters in Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. There was also talk of throwing some voodoo into the mix, hence the veve tattoos. It wasn’t to be, of course. Little of my work has ever resembled mainstream comics fare and Jamie’s publishers, DC Comics, had already been underwhelmed by the detailed style I was using in the Lovecraft and Lord Horror comics. When I tried presenting them with some trial pages in a more open style I was told that they’d been expecting to see more of my detailed line work…

We had a couple of other characters planned, including a tattooed islander inspired by Queequeg from Moby Dick, but the samples here are the best of the sketches. The shark- or whale-jaw false leg was my own invention and something I’m fairly sure I’ve not seen before. I’ve no idea whether such a thing is workable but it was a nice touch.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buccaneers #1
• Howard Pyle’s pirates
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).

A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)

Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O my brothers: Kubrick, cover design and electronic music in one convenient 12-inch package. Those of us in Britain who were too young to see A Clockwork Orange during its initial run had to wait a long time for its re-release after Stanley K withdrew the film from circulation. Until bootleg VHS copies started to turn up in the Eighties I knew the film mostly from the MAD Magazine parody and the soundtrack album which was ubiquitous in secondhand record shops. Having become familiar with the score, an extra layer of frustration was added when it became apparent that two soundtrack albums had appeared in the Seventies, the “official” one, which was a mix of the orchestral and electronic music used in the film, and another which contained all the music Walter (later Wendy) Carlos recorded.

The Wendy Carlos music was the principal attraction for this electronic music obsessive and I fretted for a long while trying to find a copy of her Complete Original Score album which was paraded in all its elusive glory on old CBS vinyl inner sleeves. Half the tracks are present on the official release but the omissions are crucial: Timesteps, the incredible composition which accompanies Alex’s first deprogramming session was edited down from thirteen to five minutes, there was Carlos’s Moog version of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (an orchestral version is used in the film) and also an original piece, Country Lane, intended to accompany Alex’s police brutality session at the hands of his former droogs. This score was one of the first projects to successfully incorporate a vocoder into electronic compositions; Carlos’s regular collaborator Rachel Elkind provided the vocalisations. Finally securing a copy was no disappointment, in fact I was overwhelmed. This is still my favourite Wendy Carlos album and one of my top five favourite analogue synth albums. The transcription of La Gazza Ladra is nothing short of miraculous, thundering away with the power of a full orchestra yet created by laboriously recording one note at a time. (Wendy Carlos’s very thorough website goes into detail about the recording process.)

The original Human League, circa 1979.

I wasn’t the only person to take note of this, the album had already made a big impact on Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh in Sheffield, whose early electronic music as The Future, and later The Human League, owed much to the early Carlos Moog albums. Albums such as this were important to the electronic groups that came to prominence later in the decade for the simple reason that there was little music of this quality around. Cross the Wendy Carlos ACO with Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk and The Human League is the result.

The Future were keen to create cut-up lyrics à la David Bowie, who’d been swiping William Burroughs’s writing techniques several years earlier. Rather than chop up notebooks as Bowie was doing, the Marsh and Ware approach was effected using a (no doubt rudimentary) computer system which they named CARLOS: Cyclic And Random Lyric Organisation System. Some specific connections to A Clockwork Orange came following their 1980 split from The Human League when their post-League band, Heaven 17, took its name from Burgess’s novel (the group is also mentioned in the film’s record store scene). A brief post-League incarnation as the British Electric Foundation had them include on their releases a 30-second BEF ident, composed by Malcolm Veal “in the style of Bach and Purcell”. Wendy Carlos’s first synth album was Switched-On Bach, of course, and the title music to A Clockwork Orange is based on Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

David Pelham’s classic Penguin cover for the 1972 paperback edition. Kubrick’s film has the droogs wearing white but this cover honours the description of their coloured outfits. The film has come to dominate later representations of Alex and company and the current Penguin edition continues Kubrick’s white-on-white minimalism.

The original 1972 poster and a 1973 paperback edition of Alexander Walker’s Kubrick study.

It’s always gratifying when an album you like a great deal has good sleeve art and the illustration for the Carlos ACO I still rate as one of the most successful designs based on Burgess’s novel, with its focus on the themes rather than Alex’s character. Kubrick’s film and the official soundtrack is still promoted with variations on the original poster art by illustrator Philip Castle (above). I’ve yet to discover who designed the fat Seventies-styled title lettering.

The Carlos cover was the work of Karenlee Grant, a CBS designer and cover artist. Of the other designs of hers that I’ve been able to trace this is easily the best, alluding in its combination of collage and perspex case to the work of American Surrealist Joseph Cornell.

Close scrutiny reveals a wealth of clever detail, not only the obvious juxtaposition of clock parts and an orange slice, but elements such as the eye caught in a vice and the medical drips labelled “yes” and “no” which refer to Alex’s treatment.

This detail below crams a huge amount of reference into a small space, from Ludwig Van’s “thunderbolted litso” in the background, snared by a Helvetica numeral, to the Freudian motifs in the foreground.

Another of Ms Grant’s designs from this period was a self-titled release by the Jeff Beck group, not an especially notable design apart from the curious detail of the orange among the photos. No oranges are mentioned in the songs, as far as I’m aware. Given that the album was released five months after Kubrick’s film, was this a strained attempt to cash-in on the huge publicity the film generated?

Jeff Beck Group by the Jeff Beck Group (1972).

Glenn Gould: Consort of Musicke by William Byrd & Orlando Gibbons (1971); The Hollies’ Greatest Hits (1973).

A couple more Karenlee Grant covers obliquely related to the ACO sleeve, with another constructed object as the focus of one and a collage work for the other. Glenn Gould offered the highest praise to Wendy Carlos’s earlier Bach recordings so I imagine he would have appreciated ACO as well. What Karenlee Grant did after the mid-Seventies is unknown, I can’t find much work mentioned after this period so I’m guessing she left the music business.

Wendy Carlos’s album was reissued on CD in 2000 on the ESD label, a superb edition which added a couple of minor outtakes. My only gripe was that Karenlee Grant’s cover art wasn’t reused for the cover (it’s reproduced in the booklet) but I have to accept it wouldn’t have been the same reduced to CD size; some album sleeves were intended to be seen in their 12-inch glory.

For anyone interested in Wendy Carlos’s oevre, this album is the place to start. For anyone interested in the history of electronic music, this is an essential purchase.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Another delivery of work of mine this week with this new design for Savoy Books. Horror Panegyric is a small volume examining David Britton’s Lord Horror novels, writer Keith Seward being the founder of the web’s best William Burroughs site, RealityStudio, and also an author of avant garde erotic fictions which can be found at his Supervert site. The cover painting for this book was my Arcimboldo-style portrait of Lord Horror which originally appeared on the cover of Reverbstorm #3.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches

I posted the text of William Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer last year as there wasn’t a copy of Gus Van Sant’s film version available anywhere. YouTube has now filled that gap.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs gives thanks
• The Final Academy
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)

The Men with snakes post at the weekend finished on a note of Freudian melodrama with a picture of Doc Savage battling a giant python. Lester Dent’s brazen hero has appeared a number of times in the work of Philip José Farmer, a writer who’s spent much of his career laying bare the psychosexual forces which give us stories of pulp heroes struggling with (among other things) enormous snakes.

Farmer is famous—notorious, even—for being the first writer to place sex centre stage in science fiction with his story of a human/alien encounter, The Lovers, in 1952. While subsequent writers have broadened the field in their own way, Farmer is somewhat unique in being equally adept at writing solidly successful sf adventure such as the World of Tiers or Riverworld books, yet with a mischievous and intellectual facility that could be upsetting to what used to be a very conservative sf establishment. Farmer was writing about sex at a time when few genre writers wanted to deal with the subject. He also loves pulp fiction in all its manifestations yet isn’t afraid of examining its characters with the objectivity of an anthropologist. Both these impulses came together (so to speak) in the late Sixties with the outrageous pulp pornography of Image of the Beast and A Feast Unknown. More about these in a minute.

Farmer has a particular enthusiasm for Tarzan and Doc Savage and eventually wrote “official biographies” of the pair with Tarzan Alive (1972) and the splendidly-titled Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973). These books saw the beginning of his Wold Newton Universe which sought to connect all the heroes and villains of the late 19th and early 20th century into a vast, incestuous family tree, a scheme which predates similar exercises such as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by three decades or more. His versatility and delight in pastiche was demonstrated in Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod (1968) which rewrote Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan in the style of William Burroughs. There aren’t many writers with a full-enough appreciation of both these authors to pull off such a challenge.

Original Essex House editions, 1968 & 1969. Artist/designer unknown although the cover of Blown is based on Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador Dalí.

Image of the Beast (1968), its sequel, Blown (1969), and A Feast Unknown (1969) were all written for sf-porn publisher Essex House, an opportunity which unleashed Farmer’s already fertile imagination. These took a while to be reprinted but are now considered among his best works; they’re certainly favourites of mine and I love the simple graphics of the original covers, such a change from the usual airbrushed sf fare. I produced a cover illustration for the Creation Books edition of Image/Blown in 2001 which, while okay, I now feel could have been better. A Feast Unknown is Farmer’s most gloriously excessive novel, and still surprises when read today. Illustrator Patrick Woodroffe, who painted the cover for the first UK printing, thought the book “dangerous” and complained in his Mythopoeikon collection that there was little he could safely illustrate. The story has a thinly-disguised Tarzan (Lord Grandrith) and Doc Savage (Doc Caliban) set against each other by a group of mysterious immortals. The pair discover that violence gives them erections and killing provokes an orgasm, the cue for a couple of hundred pages of eye-popping, ball-busting mayhem. It’s ironic that during the Seventies when general readers were looking for racy thrills in books by Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins, the real hardcore stuff was over on the science fiction shelves with Farmer’s work, Ballard’s Crash, Samuel Delany’s Equinox, aka The Tides of Lust, Charles Platt’s The Gas, and others.

Farmer wrote two equally crazy sequels to Feast in 1970, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin but unfortunately stripped out the excesses of the former book. I’ve always been disappointed by this and continue to hope that one day the original versions of the sequels will see print. Science fiction may have calmed down a bit (or grown conservative again) since the Seventies but Farmer’s work still exerts an influence. His unveiling of the weird psychosis at the heart of pulp fiction certainly affected the approach I took with the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm, created with David Britton in the 1990s, a series I’ve referred to more than once as a psychopathology of heroic fantasy.

The covers above all come from the official PJF website which also includes my Image/Blown cover design. (And where they also spell my name wrong.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Men with snakes
• The book covers archive

left: Andre Deutsch (1958); right: Penguin (1972).

In a year filled with cultural anniversaries, here’s another. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is fifty years old next month and to celebrate this Penguin is publishing the book in its original form for the first time. Although the cover of the first edition described the text as “complete and unexpurgated”, names were changed to protect the innocent and/or guilty and other aspects, such as some very mild gay sex references, were removed. The same site I linked to last year with a great selection of William Burroughs book covers has another section devoted to Kerouac’s magnum opus.

The challenge with this book is whether or not to feature a road as the main image; some designers rise to that challenge better than others. The Ukrainian cover crudely modelled on a Jack Daniel’s label is a particularly unfortunate choice considering that the author died prematurely from cirrhosis of the liver. As with William Burroughs, some translations of the title work better than others: Unterwegs (German) sounds clunky to English ears while Sulla Strada (Italian) has more poetry than the original.

• The Observer on the book’s fiftieth anniversary
• Beat Scene magazine
• Kerouac’s bisexuality explored at GLBTQ

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

An eBay auction. All proceeds, after costs, will benefit Arthur Magazine.

“What else can I say? William Burroughs & his Gilded Cobra…. it’s actually my cobra ….”
Ira Cohen.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

The Digger issue, August 1968.

Here’s something of major importance, The Realist Archive Project. Four complete issues online so far, with a promise of all 146 issues to be uploaded eventually. The Realist started out as a satirical magazine in the late Fifties and moved into the slipstream of the counter-culture as the Sixties progressed. Editor Paul Krassner is introduced in the RE/Search Pranks (1987) book thus:

Paul Krassner is famous for doing The Realist (1958-1974; now revived), described by OUI magazine as “the most satirical and irreverent journal to appear in America since the days of HL Mencken.” The Realist published explicit photos, outrageous cartoons, vicious satire, and extreme paranoid conspiracy theories on topics ranging from the Kennedy assassinations to Jonestown. When Mike Wallace asked him on a 60 Minutes interview about the difference between the underground press and mainstream media, he told him that Spiro Agnew was an anagram for Grow A Penis, adding, “The difference is that I could print that in the Realist, but it’ll be edited out of this program.” That prediction came true. Harry Reasoner said of Krassner that he “not only attacks establishment values; he attacks decency in general.”

During his lifetime of weird experiences and friendships with notables like Lenny Bruce and Timothy Leary, Krassner claims (among other things) to have taken LSD when he testified at the Chicago 8 trial, on the Johnny Carson show, with Groucho Marx, and with Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good. In 1977 he became publisher of Hustler magazine for six months.

I first encountered the Realist from mentions in Robert Anton Wilson’s books (RAW was one of its writers) but, unlike UK undergrounds which often turned up secondhand, there was no way to ever see a copy over here. Hence the value of this archive. If you want an idea of Krassner’s outrageousness—which makes much of the political sniping of Private Eye seem very tame indeed—look no further than the May 1967 issue with its lead story describing Lyndon B Johnson fucking the dead John F Kennedy’s neck wound shortly before his being sworn in as president. And in the same issue there’s the notorious cartoon spread by Wally Wood depicting a host of Disney characters doing all the things that recently-deceased Uncle Walt wouldn’t allow them to do in the cartoons. That drawing was so scurrilous that it’s generally supposed Disney preferred not to sue for fear of giving it greater publicity.

The issue edited by the anarchist Diggers was altogether more serious, and the list of names involved shows a lineage connecting the Beats to the hippies:

Memo to the Reader

When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on the hippies last year, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.”

Thus were they supposed to remain—a frozen fad for posterity.

But a few months ago, police rioted on Haight St. Next day, at a town hall meeting in the Straight Theater, the spectrum of reaction ranged from “Let’s have another be-in” to “We gotta get guns!” A compromise was reached: bottles painted Love were thrown at the cops.

And yet, the question remains—What is being defended?

This issue of the Realist, therefore, has been created entirely by The Diggers, in an attempt to convey the flavor and feeling-tone of a revolutionary community.

An inadequate list of the brothers and sisters whose work is represented in this document:

Antonin Artaud, Richard Avedon, Billy Batman, Peter Berg, Wally Berman, Richard Brautigan, Bryden, William Burroughs, Martin Carey, Neil Cassidy, Fidel Castro, Don Cochran, Peter Cohon, Gregory Corso, Dangerfield, Kirby Doyle, Bill Fritsch, Allen Ginsberg, Emmett Grogan, Dave Haselwood, George Hermes, Linn House, Lenore Kandel, Billy Landout, Norman Mailer, Don Martin, Michael McClure, George Metesky, George Montana, Malcolm X, Natural Suzanne, Huey Newton, Pam Parker, Rose-a-Lee, David Simpson, Gary Snyder, Ron Thelin, Rip Torn, Time Inc., Lew Welch, Thomas Weir, Gerard Winstanley, and Anonymous.

The contents herein are not copyrighted. Anyone may reprint anything without permission. Additional copies are available at the rate of 5 for $1. The Diggers have been given 40,000 copies to spread their word: free.

Many of those writers are no longer around but happily Paul Krassner is and he’s been writing regularly for The Huffington Post, the Arthur magazine weblog and other sites.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
• Simplicissimus
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Underground history
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• Robert Anton Wilson, 1932–2007
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

The first question has to be “Bertrand who?” but you won’t receive an answer here since information is scarce (see below). Bertrand’s erotic surrealism first appeared in the late Sixties, going by the dates in collections of his work. Some of his paintings and drawings crept into the underground mags of the period then turned up in odd places throughout the Seventies. The first I saw of any Bertrand art was on the cover of the pre-Savoy publication, Wordworks #6, and a music paper ad for the Chrome 12″, Inworlds.

French porn publisher Eric Losfeld produced a couple of large, limited edition collections of Bertrand’s work in the early Seventies. All the drawings reproduced here are from the battered 1971 volume shown above. If it seems surprising that these haven’t been reprinted it may be that Bertrand’s concerns are too weird or simply too unpleasant for contemporary tastes. Many of his ink drawings, and some of his paintings, seem to have begun life as decalcomania splotches, a Surrealist technique invented by Oscar Dominguez as a means of injecting chance into the creative process. Decalcomania produces random patterns which the artist then elaborates upon. Max Ernst’s famous Europe After the Rain, and a number of his other paintings from the 1940s, began life as a field of vaguely organic marks created by pressing thickly applied paint to the canvas with a sheet of glass or paper. Bertrand used ink stains in a similar way, with the result that most of his doe-eyed female figures (and his figures are nearly always women) are fringed by leafy or fungal growths. Many of his scenes are a kind of lesbian equivalent of the human/alien entanglements one finds in William Burroughs’ more elaborate flights of fancy. If his women aren’t being absorbed into some organic mass, they’re often being subject to investigation (even impalement) by spikes or claws, and here we perhaps find the reason his work remains out of print. Feminists then and now would have taken a dim view of Bertrand’s more violent works; even if Taschen did produce a Bertrand collection, it’s unlikely that many of the more grotesque pictures would be included.

All the pictures in the Losfeld books were produced in a short period from 1967–69. What happened to Bertrand afterwards remains a mystery. Did he decide to do pursue a different, more commercial direction? Is he still alive? The books offer no clue but maybe someone out there has the answer.

Update: Nathalie discovers that the artist in question is Raymond Bertrand, and more of his work can be seen here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Oz magazine, 1967–73

Ballard-for-kids from Lion (1970).

I was never a great hoarder of comics when I was a child, I usually read them then threw them away, so for years I’ve had peculiar half-memories of stories that thrilled me when I was 10-years old but whose titles I’ve invariably forgotten. The web, of course, serves to immediately answer desperately nagging questions such as “Who was the boy in a home-made catsuit climbing all over buildings at night?” (Billy the Cat, and sister Katie), “Which comic did bendable hero Janus Stark appear in?” (Smash and later Valiant), and so on.

British comics nearly always seemed stranger than American ones even though I was a regular reader of Spider-Man and a couple of other Marvel comics. Many of the British adventure titles—all long since expired—were created by artists and writers who drew freely on pulp traditions from the late 19th and early 20th century. Reading through histories of comics such as Lion it’s notable how many of the stories are set in the Victorian era. These tales were invariably hokey and certainly don’t bear much examination now but I can trace later interests back to an early stimulation by these odd strips.

The evil Ezra Creech.

I’m actually surprised to discover that I was a regularly reader of Lion, its list of characters is very familiar yet I don’t remember buying a single issue. Lion is significant for being home to one of my favourite strips of the period, the chilling horror/thriller The War of the White Eyes. I’ve yet to meet anyone who remembers reading this which used to be frustrating when I’d pester comic-collecting friends to try and recall which title it appeared in. The story was fairly standard adventure fare from 1972:

The War Of The White Eyes was a US-type fantasy strip which had our heroes, Nick Dexter and Don Redding, trying to thwart the evil megalomaniac, Ezra Creech, who was baying for world domination by inhaling a deadly gas that transformed him into a ‘White-Eyes’, a creature of superhuman strength and ferocity. At first, Creech wanted to destroy our heroes’ home island of Doomcrag and then go on to world domination, but guess who stopped him?

If you live in a place called Doomcrag you’re asking for trouble. I didn’t remember there being a super-villain involved although someone had to be responsible for raining the globes of deadly gas down on the populace.

Creech could turn people into white-eyed zombies under his control. He had superhuman strength as a White Eye. He later developed a ray that allowed him to make things grow, giving him the ability to create monsters.

JMB Chemicals developed a new gas as a mild insecticide. However it proved to have unforeseen side-effects. Men and animals exposed to it were transformed into killers of extraordinary strength and ferocity, recognisable by their white eyes. The first evidence of this came when a few glasses containers of the gas accidentally dropped from the back of a van transporting them through the peaceful English town of Wimbering. Those exposed demonstrated an innate hatred of anyone untainted, and set out to conquer the area and kill “the weaklings”. Even the army proved helpless, with White Eyes ripping apart tanks with their bare hands and throwing them around like toys. Even the White Eyes animals joined in, with contaminated birds attacking troops on the ground. It was only through the bravery and ingenuity of local boys Nick Dexter and Don Redding, and the scientist Timms who had developed the gas in the first place (and also concocted an antidote) that order was restored.

This was very much a horror strip for kids—at least as I remember it—with crazed, white-eyed people and animals going on the rampage, and the ever-present danger that our heroes could be infected themselves. The strip taught me very early on that the simplest way to make someone look evil was to blank out their pupils, something I spent the rest of the decade doing in drawing after drawing.

Kid Chameleon takes off.

Another favourite was Kid Chameleon (not to be confused with a later computer game character) whose adventures appeared in my favourite comic of the time, Cor!!:

Stranded in the Kalahari Desert by a plane crash, a British boy is raised by lizards as a feral child, and weaves himself a skin-tight suit of transparent lizard scales which covers his entire body except the top of his head (to avoid the appearance of complete nudity, he also wears a pair of flesh-coloured briefs underneath). Only one strip shows how the suit comes off. It consists of two pieces: a top that opens at the front, and leggings. The suit allows him to camouflage himself like a chameleon by making the scales change colour, although how he does it is never explained.

Yes, I was eagerly reading about a near-naked boy when I was 10; make of that what you will. Kid Chameleon spent two years tracking down the man who caused the plane crash before returning to the desert and the company of the lizards. This strikes me as a very Burroughs-esque idea now, there being plenty of lizard boys and skin suits in Burroughs’ early novels such as The Soft Machine and The Ticket that Exploded. In many ways, Kid Chameleon isn’t far removed from the various incarnations of the Wild Boys—resourceful, shape-shifting and always a loner. By a curious coincidence Burroughs was in London writing Port of Saints, the sequel to The Wild Boys, at the time Cor!! was publishing Kid Chameleon.

There aren’t any pages online from The War of the White Eyes; perhaps that’s for the best, it would only shatter my vague memories even further. However, you can see a couple of pages from Kid Chameleon here, written by Scott Goodall. The strip was drawn by Joe Colquhoun, later the artist on Charlie’s War by Pat Mills.

There are few people who really change your life but Robert Anton Wilson—who died earlier today—certainly changed mine. Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy (written with Robert Shea) was my cult book when I was at school in the 1970s, a rambling, science fiction-inflected conspiracy thriller that opened the doors in my teenaged brain to (among other things) psychedelic drugs, HP Lovecraft, James Joyce, William Burroughs and Aleister Crowley as well as being a crash-course in enlightened anarchism. I’ve had people criticise the books to me since for their ransacking of popular culture but this was partly the point, they were collage works, and they worked as a perfect introduction for a young audience to worlds outside the usual circumscribed genres.

The philosophical side of Wilson’s work was probably the most important at the time (and remains so now), his “transcendental agnosticism” made me start to question the adults around me who were trying to force my life to go in a direction I wasn’t interested in at all. I’m sure I would have resisted that kind of pressure anyway but the value of RAW’s writings in Illuminatus! and the later Cosmic Trigger came with being given an intelligent rationale for those decisions; I couldn’t necessarily articulate why I was “throwing my life away” by wanting to drop out of the whole education system but Wilson’s work had convinced me it was the right thing to do. I still mark the true beginning of my life as May 1979, the month I left school for good.

He wouldn’t want us to be maudlin, I’m sure. It’s typical for a writer who spent so much of his life writing about drugs and coincidences that he managed to die on Albert Hofmann’s birthday. So I’ll just say thank you Robert, for changing my life. And Hail Eris!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Burroughs by Coulthart (2001).

Lengthy article examining the WSB worldview through a Gnostic lens.

Via Further.

Shinro Ohtake is always on the attack. Whether it’s against misguided art education, against the cold treatment and economic constraints Japan puts on anyone who could dare to live differently, against the contemporary art establishment that can’t be bothered to even disguise its own incomprehension—his fight as an artist continues. Ohtake is prodigious, original, and a trouble-maker—in the sense that the work of the artist is always to create difference.

William Burroughs

Two disparate things had me looking for Shinro Ohtake’s work this week: I’ve been doing a short interview about album cover design (more about that at a later date) in which I mentioned his collage for the cover of Seven Souls by Material (1989), then an editorial in the latest Wire describes his current retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

The Material cover is one I picked as a favourite design. It’s difficult trying to pin-point why I think this works so well without it being at all illustrational. (I’m guessing, but it’s likely that Bill Laswell picked it out of one of Ohtake’s collage books, rather than it being specially commissioned.) It may be the collage aspect that works here. The album features readings by William Burroughs set to music and for me is the best of all the Burroughs recordings (Dead City Radio being a close second). Burroughs’ work, of course, involved literary collage via his own cut-up process, and the musical content can also be seen as a collage in the way it mixes different styles and musicians—Simon Shaheen, Shankar, Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Fahiem Dandan and samples of the famous Brian Jones recordings of the Jajouka pipers. It’s a shame that when the CD was reissued in 1997 (in a superior mastering, it should be noted), the original artwork was largely junked in favour of a lot of muddy Photoshop work from the usually excellent Russell Mills. I’ve a huge respect for Mills but this treatment was a serious mistake.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers

William Burroughs.

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986.

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.• From Tornado Alley (1989).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.

William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A recent posting on the Grey Lodge is a torrent of The Final Academy Documents, the shoddily-produced DVD made from the low-grade video recordings that captured the event (originally an Ikon Video production from Factory). The DVD is so badly presented by Cherry Red that no one should feel guilty about downloading this.

I’ve always been grateful that a record was made of this event, however poor, since I was in the audience that evening, very conscious of the fact that this was my one and only opportunity to see Burroughs in the flesh. His appearance was the magical part of a scaled-down version of the larger two-day Final Academy that had taken place earlier that week in London. The rest of the event was either strange or underwhelming, not helped by the chilly and elitist atmosphere of Manchester’s newest and most famous club. In the days before “Madchester” and the rave scene (the period that gets excised from the city’s cultural history), the Haçienda was a cold, grey concrete barn with terrible acoustics and a members-only policy that required the flourishing of a Peter Saville-designed card at the door. The place was usually half-empty and the clientèle tended to be students living nearby.

Burroughs’ presence that evening at least managed to fill out the space, even if a large portion of the audience didn’t seem to know why they were there or what the whole thing was about. Some of the films made by Burroughs’ collaborator Antony Balch (Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups) were shown on the club’s big projection screens then John Giorno took to the stage to give a spirited and funny presentation of his performance poetry. I hadn’t heard of Giorno before, or his Giorno Poetry Systems, which had been putting readings by Burroughs and others on record, but he was very entertaining.

Burroughs followed, reading from The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. It later became apparent that this was part of an ongoing scheme by his manager, James Grauerholz, to get the aged writer in front of audiences and earning some much-needed money. Whatever money he made was well-earned since few writers can deliver their work in public with as much style and wit, as the numerous recordings of his later readings testify. I’m not sure now what I expected from his reading but I remember being surprised at the degree of humour involved. What might seem cold and dead on the page came to life dripping with satiric vitriol under the stress of that snarling delivery. After this, the screening of a lengthy video by Psychic TV was something of an anti-climax, even if the blood and other fluids on display did provoke one audience member to exclaim “Why are you watching this?!” before storming out.

The Final Academy was the first event I attended at the Haçienda and certainly one of the best, equalled only by an incredibly ferocious performance from Einstürzende Neubauten a few months later. This featured broken glass flying into the audience and the band drilling into the concrete wall of the venue with a pneumatic drill (part of their stage equipment at the time) which they then left hanging from the wall. I don’t think the Haçienda management were pleased by that. I caught the Burroughs event just as I was preparing to move to the city myself and it made Manchester immediately seem like a vital and worthwhile place to be; how things change…. It’s curious now the way this pointed towards my future work here; also in the audience that evening were future friends and colleagues Michael Butterworth and Martin Flitcroft of Savoy Books. Mike’s sister was part of the Ikon Video team who were filming the event and Savoy are credited on the Final Academy video release. William Burroughs is one of the dark angels presiding over the entire Savoy project; Mike and Dave Britton recounted in an interview with Sarajane Inkster their memories of meeting him in New York City.

William Burroughs in the Rue Git-le-Coeur, circa 1960.

The programme booklets and posters for the Final Academy were designed by Neville Brody. It would have been nice to see the DVD release use Brody’s designs but that’s obviously expecting too much of the incompetents at Cherry Red. Among the many photographs inside Brody’s booklet are some showing Burroughs in the Rue Git-le-Coeur, Paris, from the period when he was living in the famous Beat Hotel with Brion Gysin and others. I managed to track down the hotel on my last trip to the city. The street seems to have retained much of its earlier character but the hotel itself has received a bland makeover that says “international” and “expensive”. One can’t help but wonder where the Beats would migrate to today in the search for cheap accommodation; it certainly wouldn’t be Paris or London or, for that matter, Manchester. Prague? Somewhere in Brazil maybe?

The street as it is today, with the former Beat Hotel on the left.

The Final Academy was a defining moment in what, for want of a better term, is now seen as the Industrial Culture scene, Burroughs having been adopted as godfather by most of the prime movers in that movement-that-wasn’t-quite-a-movement. Psychic TV grew out of Throbbing Gristle, of course, and one of the last releases on TG’s Industrial Records label was Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, a collection of Burroughs’ early tape experiments. 23 Skidoo sampled (in the days before sampling…) a snatch of those recordings for The Gospel Comes to New Guinea, a single produced by Cabaret Voltaire, and both these bands played at the London Final Academy event. At the time this meeting of literary and avant garde musical culture didn’t seem so surprising but 24 years on it seems increasingly unique and unrepeatable. Despite Burroughs’ considerable influence, the events in London and Manchester weren’t the inspirational moment that the organisers and participants might have wished as the 1980s turned out to be a decade of pop trivia and much political and cultural conservatism. Burroughs continued to produce good work (his musical collaborations, Seven Souls with Material and the Dead City Radio readings were high points) but Brion Gysin died in 1986 and many of the musical performers gradually ran out of steam or lost their way as the decade progressed. The “final” part of The Final Academy was more of a terminal declaration than anyone realised at the time.

Brainwashed has some reviews and interviews concerning The Final Academy here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Too many great designs to choose from so I’ve picked out two favourites by Thomi Wroblewski for Picador editions of the early Eighties. Cities of the Red Night remains my favourite Burroughs novel and I still toy with the idea of doing an illustrated edition one day.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

Performance, filmed in 1968 but not released until 1970, is his masterpiece: the original sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll movie.

He wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, who was brought in to look after the cinematography, leaving Cammell free to deal with the actors and the partly improvised storyline. It has become a cult classic, the subject of two books, scores of essays, a poster magazine and a novelisation. Many now regard it as the greatest British film yet made.

Another myth claimed Cammell as the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley’s godson. He was not, but Crowley was a family friend and did bounce the young Cammell on his knee. Cammell, born in 1934, was a member of the shipbuilding family. His father was editor of The Connoisseur and Donald was raised in an atmosphere of bourgeois bohemianism. He was sent, at the age of 8 to the Catholic Abbey School at Fort Augustus, where his “hysterical reaction” was so extreme that his parents had to withdraw him after two terms. The authors argue convincingly that Cammell’s later self-destructive behaviour was shaped by sexual abuse at school.

He attended art college, then studied with the painter Pietro Annigoni. As the authors put it: “It goes without saying that he was attractive, talented, charming and charismatic.”

He developed a clientele among the Chelsea set and gained a reputation as a ladies’ man, seducing many of his sitters, disrupting marriages and having affairs with well-known actresses. In 1954 he renounced portraiture and enrolled in the Royal Academy School.

Such abrupt life-changes became a feature of his life. They were often caused by days of bleak depression—the family had a history of manic depression—when he brooded about suicide and death. Almost always they were ill-advised and self- destructive, particularly during his career as a film-maker. He sabotaged so many projects that he completed only four films in his life.

While at the RA he married the Greek actress Maria Andipa, but as his favourite sexual relationship was a ménage à trois with a few male friends, it was a rocky ride, and ended in October 1959 when Maria had a baby.

Emotionally immature, he could not handle the responsibility, walked out the day after she came home from hospital and rejected all efforts by his son to see him.

His unorthodox views on sexuality and heavy drug use marked him as a precursor of the hippie movement. His friend David Litvinoff said that “by 1960 Donald had tried every drug and every known combination of drugs known to man”.

From 1960–67 he lived in Paris with the model Deborah Roberts. He became one of the beautiful people, flitting from Paris to London and Rome in his sports car, but the black moods and talk of suicide were ever present, like the underlying menace throughout Performance.

Cammell drifted into film-making, first as an actor, then a screenwriter. Performance was the first film he directed. It has a multitude of influences, from Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant, which made James Fox a star, to John Boorman’s Point Blank, which he insisted that the whole cast and crew see. He claimed the film-maker Kenneth Anger as “the major influence at the time I made Performance“, much of which is “directly attributable to him”.

The final edit was based to an extent on the random cutting-up in Antony Balch and William Burroughs’s 1962 film The Cut Ups. Although credited entirely to Cammell, Performance’s screenplay was written on the beach at St Tropez by Cammell, Roberts and Anita Pallenberg. (At one point, a gust of wind blew the whole script into the sea and Anita had to iron each page to dry it out.) Collaboration was a strong part of the Sixties ethos and was Cammell’s favoured method of working; it was a way of avoiding his self-destructive tendency to sabotage whatever he was doing.

Even so he managed to delay the film for a year by being obdurate with Warner Brothers about editing: they wanted another Hard Day’s Night, with Jagger appearing early on. In Cammell’s version, he did not appear for an hour. The solution was to create Cammell’s signature style: Performance became a montage of rapid intercuts and flashbacks, a kaleidoscope of images, the precursor of today’ s rock videos.

Cammell was invited to Hollywood but nothing he did later could match the artistic and critical success of Performance and, still gripped by black depressions, he killed himself in 1996 at the age of 62.

A heavily illustrated labour of love, this book is in great need of an editor, but it goes a long way towards explaining Cammell’s tortured genius.